FICO - Your Credit Score

Since we live in a computer-driven society, you're probably not surprised to hear that your creditworthiness comes down to a single number. All the years you've been paying your various bills: your mortgage, vehicle payments, and credit card bills are analyzed, diced, spindled and mutilated into a single indicator of whether you're likely to meet your future obligations.

Each of the three credit reporting agencies has its own formula for building your credit score. Fair Isaac and Cooriginally developed this score. . While Experian still calls its score "FICO", TransUnion calls its score "Beacon" and Equifax uses "Empirica." While the formulas vary from one agency to another, each agency uses the following to build a credit score:

• Your Credit History - How long have you had credit?
• History of Payments - Do you pay your bills on time?
• Balances on your Credit Cards - How many accounts do you have? How much do you owe?
• Inquiries on Your Credit - How many times have you had your credit checked for a loan?

Each of these is assigned a value and a weight. Each formula produces a single number which may vary a a little from one agency to another. Credit scores can be as low as 300 and as high as 800. Higher is better. Most home buyers in the current environment have a score above 620.

Your FICO score greatly affects your interest rate

Did you know? FICO scores are used for more than just determining whether or not you qualify for a mortgage. Higher scores indicate you are a better credit risk, and thus may qualify for a better mortgage rate.

Improving your score

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot you can do to immediately improve your credit score. Because the FICO score is entirely based on your lifelong credit history, it is hard to significantly improve the score with quick fixes. You must, of course, appeal for the credit agency to remove any incorrect data from your credit report, which is the only "quick fix" for credit problems.

How do I find out my FICO score?

To improve your credit score, you must obtain the reports that are used to build it. Of course, you need the score as well. Fair Isaac has created a web site (www.myFICO.com) that lets you do just that. For a reasonable fee, you can get your FICO score from all three agencies, along with your credit report. They also provide helpful information and tools that can help you analyze what actions might have the greatest impact on your FICO score.

You can get a federally-mandated free credit report once a year from the three major agencies at AnnualCreditReport.com. While this report does not include a free credit score, the cost to "upgrade" your report to include a credit score is very reasonable.

Now that you have all the facts, you will be a more informed consumer and you'll be better positioned to get the most favorable mortgage.

Curious about credit scores? Call us: (203) 729-6681.